Liam Egan / Writing

I. Introduction

Foucault concludes the first volume of The History of Sexuality with a provocative formulation. “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality,” he writes, “ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”¹ “Perhaps one day people will wonder,” he continues, at the fact that we thought it any other way.² Seldom elsewhere in the Foucaultian oeuvre does one find such a specific prescription for radical action, let alone one directed towards particular aims. The body, following this Foucault, could be the locus of action with which one might struggle against the internalization of sexuality. Resistance to a particular relation of power is not only possible, but encouraged; through recourse to the body, one can find the way. Yet, by The History of Sexuality’s next volume nearly a decade later, this focus on the body, and on its potential for resistance, has largely disappeared. No longer is the disciplinary and biopolitical subject-body the object of study, instead shifting to a historical account of how the subject came to understand themselves as a being of desire.³ This Foucault, as well as the one who writes contemporary essays such as “The Subject and Power,” has by and large turned his attention away from the body. Simultaneously, however, this later Foucault has introduced the contention that power and freedom are necessarily interconnected.⁴ No longer is resistance’s modality tied to a particular corporeal form, contingent on the restriction to a specific realm of application. Instead, Foucault suggests that it is inherent within social reality’s very form.

What motivates these differential characterizations of resistance, and what implications do these distinct motivations carry? And why does the body figure so heavily in the first instance, while it is relatively minimized in the second? In what follows, I aim to understand the place of resistance in Foucault’s various notions of power. I will begin by considering the analysis of power which appears in Foucault’s writings during the mid 1970s, principally in texts such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume. I. I will then present some criticisms of this analysis from commentators such as Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas, who suggest primarily that subjects under this model of power are entirely predetermined and, correspondingly, that Foucault’s analyses do not hold normative import or inspire resistance. In attempting to respond to these criticisms, I will first need to turn to a modality of power which Foucault only develops in his later works. I will argue that this power analysis, primarily articulated in texts like “The Subject and Power” as well as “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” is markedly different from the earlier one. Due to this distinction, I will find that attempts by commentators such as Paul Patton to defend Foucault against his critics are insufficient as a result of his synthesizing these two modalities of power. Still yet to find a point of origin for resistance in Foucault’s earlier modality of power, I will turn to Kevin Jon Heller in search of an explanation, finding it more appropriate but insufficiently specific. I will conclude by turning to the earlier modality of power’s relationship to the body, and explicating its crucial role. By understanding the importance of the body to Foucault’s early analytics of power, I aim to argue that his analysis offers a way to understand freedom in a manner not totally determined by the workings of power, despite criticisms to the contrary. In this way, one can understand resistance as arising through the endless possibilities of the body.

II. Foucault's Early Analytics of Power

In the final chapters of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault provides something approximating a categorical description of the term ‘power.’ It refers, in this instance, to a “multiplicity of force relations” which engage in “ceaseless struggles and confrontations” and ultimately either “[form] a chain or a system” or “isolate them[selves] from one another.”⁵ Power is described as an energetic force, a matrix of relations, the dynamics of which serve as “the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole.”⁶ The entirety of the social sphere is constituted by the power relations which underlie it, and even those relations are merely the inertial product of earlier relations. “Power is everywhere,” Foucault writes, “not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”⁷ This early analytics of power supposes that an infinite network of dynamic relations engenders every social reality. Power relations “have a directly productive role,”⁸ and thus they give rise to the entirety of the social field. Whether it be relations of production, familial relations, or those of other institutions, any and all divisions of social dynamics, for this Foucault, trace their origination to the power relations by which they were produced.⁹

As social reality constantly changes, so too do relations of power. Thus, these dynamics of force which Foucault describes are made up of diffuse and distributed relations, each beset by particularized resistances. Power relations, Foucault suggests, have moments of resistance and opposition “inscribed in [them] as an irreducible opposite.”¹⁰ Power, following this definition, does not produce social reality through an action of complete triumph. Rather, the productive character of power is due both to its substructural nature as well as to its constant engagement, and conflict, with various resistances against particular instances of its force. Such constant resistance, always internal to the composition of power, thus produces a constant instability. Relations of power never settle because they are only ever made up of alternate energies, opposed directionalities which always struggle against one another and thus produce social realities equally immersed in unstable conflict.

The character of such resistances is not, however, discernible to any particular individual, institution, etc. “There is no power,” Foucault remarks, “that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives,” yet these objectives cannot be attributed to individuals but rather to the dynamics of power relationships themselves.¹¹ Individuals, Foucault will suggest in his contemporaneous lecture series “Society Must Be Defended,” are the effects or results of power’s production, the object through which power operates while simultaneously its own construction.¹² Thus acts of either power’s enforcement or subversion are engaged in by individuals, but do not have their origins within these individuals as subjects. Rather, the dynamic energy of power’s diffuse network of force relations gives rise to actions as a result of its own internal instability, “mobilizing” or “inflaming” individuals or groups to engage in “certain types of behavior.”¹³ The internal momentum of power thus contains its own “logic” which is “perfectly clear,” its “aims decipherable,”¹⁴ because such a logic is embedded in and represented by the social field of reality which power manifests, serving its attempts to achieve specific goals and nevertheless its condition of always always being beset by its own negation.

Foucault outlines in these passages a description of power which is thus universal, productive, unstable, and non-subjectively intentional. It is this general understanding of power as such which Foucault has been developing throughout Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. In the former, it takes a particular manifestation in ‘disciplinary’ form. Discipline is a modality of power which, operating in the same manner as the panopticon, produces subjects which accord to its very constraints. One who is enmeshed in relations of this form of disciplinary power, Foucault suggests, “makes them play spontaneously upon himself,” “inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles,” and finally “becomes the principle of his own subjection.”¹⁵ Thus, through power’s productivity ‘the subject’ as such is given rise to and then through its universality is completely and totally acted upon and articulated. The various institutions in which Foucault locates the operation of the disciplinary regime—the military, the school, and principally the prison—each demonstrate that power, in its disciplinary form, takes form only when it obtains total ability to produce a subject particularly tuned to its characteristic relations.

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, on the other hand, the disciplinary modality of power is brought into relation with a second instantiation of universal, productive, unstable power of a biological type. This ‘biopower’ has as its chief function the maintenance of particular forms of human life through the bringing of “life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations,” and the making “knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.”¹⁶ Social relations, following the emergence of biopower, are constituted by their continuation of a life, in a particular form, for a particular group of people.¹⁷ Resulting from the emergence of a great field of new discourses and institutions which take as their object the human in a biological sense, biopower structures the production of life itself. Moreover, it receives its instability from the fact that in producing and segmenting life in such a way, this life must be situated within the constantly-evolving series of its own techniques. In other words, biopower “distribut[es] the living in the domain of value and utility,” requiring “continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms” in order to maintain this distribution.”¹⁸ Biopower, as well as discipline, thus form two of the new developments of power whose emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Foucault charts.

These two notions, those of disciplinary and biological power, are developed by Foucault in line with the categorical description of power which I have outlined above and which is contained in the final chapters of The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. These particular modalities or apparatuses of power¹⁹ are thoroughly universal, eminently productive, and certainly both contain intentions—that to condition a subject, that to produce a given form of life—which are not able to be ascribed to any subject or group of subjects. Additionally, they are both unstable, arising only at particular historical moments and relying on varied institutional manifestations to maintain themselves. I would argue that Foucault therefore maintains, at this point, a fairly clear systematization:²⁰ power is that which “comes from below,”²¹ produces a subject, and establishes its preservation in the continual reproduction of both the subjective and non-subjective conditions of its possibility; disciplinary power is that which acts in the domain of the subject’s activity, while biopower operates upon the biological constitution of the subject’s life and the institutions which support it. These domains are obviously interlinked, as Foucault demonstrates in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, but these modalities of power are distinct nonetheless.

III. Subjectification and Normativity

Despite the relative specificity of Foucault’s various notions of power, commentators responding to him largely focus on the disciplinary modality which he develops in Discipline and Punish as well as the categorical definition which he provides in The History of Sexuality. In particular, they often concentrate on the way in which the subject is constituted, and the implications this constitution has for the possibility, or trajectory, of resistance. The first issue raised against Foucault is one often referred to by the term ‘subjectification,’ i.e. the contention that the subject is entirely determined by the productive capacity of the general notion of power. This is contrast against the modernist, humanist notion that the subject has rational agency of its own accord. For Peter Dews, Foucault’s subject is not free but rather “intrinsically heteronomous, constituted by power”²² and always “already the product of subjection to power,”²³ while for Jürgen Habermas individuals insofar as they are subjected to power “can only be perceived as exemplars, as standardized products of some discourse formation.”²⁴ The issue taken with Foucault’s account of power here is that of its force; the subject appears entirely determined by relations of power. There is little reason, it is contended, to think of subjects at all if they are only so by virtue of their constitution by power. In fact—and as some commentators will admit—this objection is part of Foucault’s very theoretical project. By illustrating the ways in which modernity produces ‘the subject’ itself, Foucault is intending to demonstrate that this subject is rational, having agency, etc. only insofar as it has been supposed to be so by particular historical developments of both disciplinary and biological power. It is therefore not the fact of subjectification which threatens Foucault itself. Rather, it is the consequences of this implication of his general analytics of power.

If the subject is totally constrained by power, it is contended, there appears to be little reason to think, as Foucault does at the most fundamental level, of resistance. Without a normative framework, there is no reason as to why any resistance should form in response to “this all-pervasive power circulating in the bloodstream of modern society.”²⁵ The consequence of subjectification, the fact that its description would demand a corresponding normative framework for any critical import, is the main criticism levied against the modality of power employed by Foucault in this stage of his thought. Nancy Fraser notes that, despite Foucault’s stated insistence on remaining analytically neutral, he employs terms with normative connotations like ‘domination’ and ‘subjugation’ which imply a corresponding normative framework.²⁶ Yet, she continues, there is none to be found in Foucault; he either avoids the question, or implicitly relies on normative notions with which he has supposedly dispensed, like the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power, or the preference of illicit action in the face of its repression.²⁷ Habermas echoes this latter critique, suggesting that “if one tries to glean the standards implicitly appealed to in his indictments of disciplinary power, one encounters familiar determinations from the normativistic language games that he has explicitly rejected.”²⁸ Foucault, it is claimed, provides an analytical description of power, supposedly remaining neutral on its constitution while simultaneously implying that this analytic ought to upset and promote resistance. Peter Dews furthers this suggestion, claiming that if Foucault is to employ the notion of ‘power’ and expect it to have any “critical political import, there must be some principle, force or entity which power ‘crushes’ or ‘subdues,’ and whose release from this repression is considered desirable.”²⁹ In effect, the criticism repeatedly insists on the repressive notion of power, believing that a value-free description of something which is so value-laden simply cannot hold.

Many commentators, admittedly, will acknowledge that Foucault intends for his analysis to appear normatively neutral. But, they contend, the analysis has no weight or purpose without such norms. “[W]hy should we muster any resistance at all” to the workings of power, Habermas asks, “instead of just adapting ourselves to it?”³⁰ Yet, I would suggest, these normative criticisms are orthogonal to Foucault’s analysis. They carry with them the assumption that critical analysis must operate on the basis of a particular normative framework. They deny the possibility that critique could serve multiple normative functions, or that it could demonstrate the infelicities of one without proposing another. Further, the assumption that subjects require a normative system in order to engage in resistance presupposes a preexisting model of the rational subject who is capable of acting on their internally-produced goals and desires. This is precisely the model which Foucault is arguing is not only not accurate, but actually produced by the modality of power whose operation he seeks to describe. Thus, to demand that a normative position emerge from Foucault’s analytics of power is to not argue against him on his own grounds, but rather to simply re-assert what he wishes to demonstrate is inaccurate.

I would, however, not like to simply discount these critiques which problematize the subjectifying and normatively-lacking aspects of Foucault’s analysis. Instead, I would like to translate them into Foucault’s framework in order to read them as generously as possible. The problem of subjectification is, for Foucault, a genuine problem. If subjects are so produced by power as he claims they are, why then would any resistance emerge? Is resistance, as Dews suggests, merely “a ubiquitous, metaphysical principle?”³¹ In response to this critique, one needs to explain how resistance emerges correlatively with power instead of, as Foucault often does, merely stating that it does. The normative critique, on the other hand, is—as I have suggested— tangential to Foucault’s main analysis of the workings of power. Yet, if one is to understand this criticism in relation to that of subjectification, it could be stated in very similar terms. Whether or not subjects actually act on any sense of norms, and whether the results of this action can possibly correlate with their causes in rational agents, resistance must, if Foucault’s model of power is to remain coherent, emerge for one reason or another. In response to a particular situation of power relations, their instability must develop because of their various productions. In other words, if power relations are to remain mobile, and not develop into calcified relations of domination, the resistance which Foucault argues is the counter-production of power must arise for one reason or another. Commentators such as Fraser and Habermas correctly identify that Foucault does not properly describe the emergence of this counter-force from within the primary force of power, but they do so through incorrectly assuming that such a force must result from a rational subject acting on a set of normative criteria in response to an exteriorized power. If one is to take on these criticisms insofar as they apply to the analysis Foucault has proposed, then the task becomes locating what, in the modality of power as he describes it, can be said to produce such internal resistance.

IV. Foucault's Late Analytics of Power

In attempting to find the locus of resistance and freedom in Foucault’s notion of power, as Karsten Schubert has noted,³² commentators tend to look to Foucault’s work later than that which I have already considered, i.e. that which follows the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. The concept of ‘power’ emerges through Foucault’s work in the 1970s, and reaches its most systematized point in the passages from that volume which I have previously examined. In the work which follows, power is treated more systemically and explicitly. Yet, many of the critics such as Fraser, Habermas, et al., are responding primarily to works such as The History of Sexuality, as the essays that typically form the foundation for defending Foucault were not to be published until the early 1980s, not to mention the lectures which would be published much later. It wold be of crucial importance, then, that the modality of power which Foucault describes in this later work is consistent with, or at least an extension of, that which is present in his earlier work, that to which his original critics are responding. If it turns out that Foucault, in these later works, is describing power in a way which is fundamentally different from his earlier analysis, one would not be able to deploy this later description in order to defend the earlier one. Before seeking the origin of resistance in Foucault’s modality of power, and especially before looking to what some commentators have claimed these origins are, it would be beneficial both to visit this later work to explicate the analytics of power which Foucault provides and to understand its relationship to that presented in his earlier work.

The most systematic version of a description of this late-stage modality of power is provided in “The Subject and Power.” In this essay, Foucault describes power as “a way in which some act on others,”³³ insofar as it is something which only exists “when it is put into action.”³⁴ Rather than a universal force which itself produces the social, the power present in this stage of Foucault’s thought is an instrumental force which can be employed in negotiating social relations. One could generously read Foucault’s claims here to suggest that this instrumental power itself produces further relations, but it is at least clear that there has been a shift in explaining the genesis of these social relations in the first place. Power, Foucault now claims, “operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself.”³⁵ Again, what is evident in this later analysis is the externality of power. Power constrains, power determines, but far less often does power produce. Whereas the modality of power exhibited in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I was universal and productive, now Foucault employs a notion of power which is instrumental and, to take his term, conductive. Power relations are still “rooted in the whole network of the social,”³⁶ but this rooting is one of “superimpos[ition], cross[ing] over, limit[ing], and...annul[ing],”³⁷ i.e. not a pure relationship of production and counter-production but rather one which operates on a number of verticalities and in a variety of relationalities. It is not that relations of power are themselves totally external, but rather that relations of power provide structure to a social field.³⁸ Nevertheless, power does indeed operate on a field, not being its sole originator but rather merely one type of relationship among many that, together, constitute a social scene.³⁹ Power of this type is thus described as far less wholly original than it is, at least in part, reactive.

More important, however, than the distinctive specificity of the generative nature of this later modality of power is the difference in its constituents. Whereas both subjects and even the notion of autonomous subjectivity, per the earlier analysis of power, are produced by its machinations, this notion of power takes them for granted. Foucault’s notion of power as “action upon an action”⁴⁰ is only applicable to the relations between subjects who are ‘free’ insofar as they are capable of taking a variety of actions in any given scenario.⁴¹ There must, in this instance, be subjects who are capable of acting in relation to the field which has been laid out for them, who—because power is always relational—both act on their own available field and, by doing so, constitute the field of actions for their partner(s). It is through this mutual relationship of possible actions, and the dependence on the constraining and encouraging of other actions by which such a relationship is constituted, that power comes to be exercised. In a contemporaneous interview, Foucault will insist that “power relations are possible only insofar as the subjects are free.”⁴² Such free acting, the ability of subjects to pick from the field of available actions in response to their ‘opponents’ in a relation of power, is totally absent from Foucault’s earlier modality of power, and yet it makes up the foundation of this new one.

Further, whereas power’s earlier categorical description was distinguished by its non- subjective intentionality producing a fundamental instability, this later one is instead characterized by its “agonism,”⁴³ the fact that it is a relationship “that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle.”⁴⁴ Such agonism characterizes power relations at this stage in Foucault’s thought not only because the relationship itself is imbued with a strategy but also, and more fundamentally, because the actors engaged in the relationship take on strategies which constantly attempt to subordinate the other and engender a new field of possible actions for them.⁴⁵ Though the remnants of non-subjective intentionality are still present in the fact that the power relationship has a strategy to it, this strategy is in fact subordinate to, and the result of, those strategies on which the actors involved in the relationship embark. Subjects again display their foundational importance here, and so it would not be reasonable to call this a non-subjective intentionality; instead it is an intentionality that is dependent on subjects absolutely to its core.

The categorical notion of ‘power’ as Foucault employs it here is one which bears remarkable similarities to his notion of ‘governmentality,’ the modality of power which he develops in his contemporary lectures collected in Security, Territory, Population. Governmentality is, in effect, the conduct of the action of people in a given population, “the control one may exercise over oneself and others, over someone’s body, soul, and behavior.”⁴⁶ This modality of power emerges during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, roughly correlative with discipline, and, according to Foucault, begins to take precedence over the others.⁴⁷ It is a modality of power defined similarly by its focus on action, and by its operation of controlling conduct through indirection and shaping of a space of possible action. Notably, it is a distinct modality of power from discipline, and only partly caught up in the development of biological power. The systematization which was clear at the end of The History of Sexuality, Vol. I is thus slightly complicated by this later addition. Discipline and government form two particular modes of ‘power,’ with the biological type being partly involved with both. However, it appears as if governmentality operates on an entirely different categorical understanding of power per se.

In this late stage of Foucault’s thought, then, one witnesses the description of an entirely different modality of power. Whereas the earlier analysis described power as a ubiquitous, productive, unstable, and non-subjective force, this later analysis concerns power insofar as it is an instrumental, conductive, agnostic, and actor-based component of social relations. In eliding the differences between these two modalities of power, one covers up what it is incredibly difficult to deny from the present historical perspective: that Foucault, over the course of developing his theoretical apparatus, has presented different concepts under the same name, and has re-incorporated the earlier one such that it may be subsumed into the framework of the later.⁴⁸ The first categorical description of power refers to that which has instances of the disciplinary and biological kind, while the second refers specifically to governmentality. When commentators gloss these analyses as describing the same concept because they use the same overarching terminology, then, the distinction between these two decidedly different understandings of power are hidden. In finally turning to consider what such commentators have suggested provide the origins of resistance, it will be important to consider that there are in fact two modalities of power which are often brought into play.

V. Possible Resistance to Power

Commentators generally suggest two places from which resistance, in Foucault’s model, can arise. The first of these points of origination, as Schubert has described,⁴⁹ is found in the later analytics of power which I have just described. Paul Patton, in responding to the criticism of Charles Taylor that Foucault’s analysis of power precludes freedom, employs “The Subject and Power” to claim just the opposite. He suggests that, though power “alter[s] the limits of positive freedom,”⁵⁰ where positive freedom is understood as “what it is possible for individuals to do or become,”⁵¹ it ultimately depends on subjects who are “defined by a certain capacity to act.”⁵² It is due to this capacity that freedom, as Foucault often claims, is the precondition for the exercise of power, and thus becomes the foundation of any relationship which is to be termed one of power.⁵³ One thus understands that resistance originates from within a relationship of power because there is no relationship of power without such resistance, or at least the possibility of it. No specific causal origin need be explained, because that is all power relations ever are, those between subjects who have some degree of freedom in how they act, and are merely having their field of actions produced, constrained, or expanded. Patton thus deploys the later analysis of power in order to accommodate for what are seen as the shortcomings of the earlier. As I argued previously, this is insufficient, because these two analyses are describing different phenomena under the same name. The modality of power to which Taylor is responding, that of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, is not the same as that which is described in “The Subject and Power.” If one is to locate the origin of resistance in the former, it is not sufficient to merely cite the latter.

Another commentator, Kevin Jon Heller, attempts to locate the origins of resistance first by looking to the early Foucault. He does so by returning to power’s non-subjective intentionality and focusing on the decentered subjectivity and contradictory subject-positions that result. Though he does not make the distinction which I have outlined, the first part of his discussion is focused primarily on Foucault’s earlier texts. For Heller, Foucault’s modality of power is non-subjectively intentional in part because the subjects that power itself produces are only ever able to act in response to this production through a socially-determined matrix which is not dependent on their subjectivity.⁵⁴ Thus, power is non-subjective because its mode of operation is a structure which is fundamentally not dependent on subjectivity. Moreover, even when subjects do understand themselves as acting with given aims and towards specific goals—an effect of power, doubtless—the actual effects of their actions do not necessarily manifest in a way which aligns with these goals.⁵⁵ In other words, when power produces subjects, and through those subjects produces modes by which its course may be altered, such alterations do not happen in accordance with the subjects intentions but rather in response to the structure of power itself. Through this process, Heller argues, beings are ‘subjectified’ resulting in subjects who “are equally unfree insofar as their choice of tactics is inevitably mediated by an institutionally- determined linguistic tradition over which they have little, if any, control.”⁵⁶ Yet, he continues, these productions of subjectivity are not universal and totalizing; there is no singular ‘power,’ no one subjectivity. Instead, he suggests that “discourses...produce both hegemonic and counter- hegemonic subject-positions.”⁵⁷ It is through the multiplicity of discourses and power formations that different instantiations, different ‘points,’ of power’s manifestation produce a variety of different positions into which subjects may be situated. Some of these positions may support the primary operations of a particular power relation while simultaneously supporting the inversion of a different one. It is from this non-subjectively intentional production of contradictory subject- positions that resistance, according to Heller, emerges. Resistance is not, as he reminds that Foucault argues, a privileged force which operates in response to the oppressive Other of ’power;’ resistance simply is power, but of opposite polarity in some particular instance.⁵⁸ Because subjects are produced in various positions, which overlap and often contradict each other, resistances form as a fractured web of disparate forces that each correspond to a specific relation of power, or its particular instantiation.

Heller’s argument appears incredibly compelling in terms of locating the origins of resistance in Foucault’s early model of power. Resistance—more properly pluralized as resistances—form as the result of disparate subject productions that overlap and contribute to equally disparate attempts to respond to relations of power. At the same time, however, his account remains unclear. Heller, following other commentators as well as myself, remains at a fairly high level of abstraction, never quite specifying what this resistance looks like or in what ways it manifests. It is not as if Heller ought to have specified tactics of power subversion, but if one is going to try to articulate the components of Foucault’s modality of power, it would be of benefit to clarify in what way each of these components manifests themselves. In Heller’s terms, one would need to ask how subjects are produced in ways which conflict and contradict one another such that power relations are kept in motion. In the following section, I will turn to the body as a component of power’s operation which I have thus far overlooked, and consider the fundamental role which it plays in producing resistance.

VI. Bodily Resistance to Power

The discussion of Foucault’s analytics of power insofar as it constitutes the subject has, thus far, left out a crucial component: the body. Foucault repeatedly asserts that the body, under this modality of power, is first and foremost the site upon which it operates. In Discipline and Punish, he writes that “power relations have an immediate hold upon [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”⁵⁹ The operations of power understood in such a way treat the body as their fundamental surface, the object over which they exercise control. In presenting one mode by which history operates in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault suggests that historical progression treats the body as “the inscribed surface of events”⁶⁰ and as something “totally imprinted”⁶² by its operations. One can understand this as a historical articulation of the workings of this type of power, which treats the body as its ultimate point of contact. In relation to power, “the individual body,” Foucault writes again in Discipline and Punish, “becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others” so that “it is constituted as a part of a multi-segmentary machine.”62 It is thus the body, and the captured multitude of bodies, upon which power operates.

Simultaneously, however, disciplinary power also produces the body in its very composition. The body “becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjugated body.”⁶³ When Foucault discusses the body as it is produced by the military regiment in the eighteenth century, it is not just that power exercises precise control over all the various articulations the body as such, but also that whatever constitutes ‘the body’ is the result of these various operations of power. It is, returning to “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” the “particular stage of forces” characteristic of power which result in an emergence, in this case of the body.⁶⁴ Thus, the body is not merely, as Judith Butler accuses,⁶⁵ a holistic entity which Foucault assumes to preexist power’s operation. Rather, the subject-forming characteristic to this modality of power is enacted through the machinery of the body, such that the body is both the site upon which power acts as well as the result of this activity.

Yet, it is not merely one body that the operations of power produce. Disciplinary power itself, Foucault suggests, “creates out of the bodies it controls four types of individuality,” different ways in which the body is constructed as an ‘individual’ in four different contexts and modes.⁶⁶ But more importantly, any particular body is actually never ‘particular’ to begin with, always both produced by and inscribed upon by a variety of relations of power. Though I have thus far been using the phrase ‘the body,’ there is in fact, following this power analytics, no such thing. Each and every corporeal articulation and manifestation is always caught up in the specific power relations which compelled it, and in relation to which it itself is further compelling. “The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes”⁶⁷ such that it is never entirely holistic in and of itself, no it-self which can ever provide a unifying entity around which power can coalesce. Every relation of power is, in effect, always both responsible for erecting but also for demolishing the boundaries which by which it delimits ‘the body’ for its particular context and operation.

Returning to Heller, one can thus understand how power produces overlapping, contradictory subject positions. If the constitution of the subject occurs through the relationship between power and the body, and this relationship is always multifaceted and derived through a number of different points resulting in a multiplicity of bodies, then the supposedly coherent subject is always alienated from themselves and never actually coherent insofar as they are always the result of a number of overlapping, and often contradictory, power-bodies. ‘The subject’ is always an abstraction, a point of generalization which conceals the eternal struggle upon their various bodies by which they have been produced.

If this modality of power always produces a multiplicity of bodies, each in conflict with one another over the determination of the subject and their body, it follows that none of these relations can ever exercise final control. In an interview given contemporaneously with the analysis of power employed in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault states that “[p]ower, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in the same body.”⁶⁸ These conflicting, overlapping bodies produce a subject always othered from itself, never totally and completely determined because of this self-contradictory situation, and thus necessarily opposed to the total determination which every relation of power ultimately seeks. If Foucault suggests that prison revolts in the latter half of the twentieth century were “revolts, at the level of the body,”⁶⁹ they were so because the body as it is compelled by the vast network of power relations employed in the prison do not ever exercise final say over the possibilities of the body. The relational character of power, combined with its target object of bodies and their possible forms, motions, etc., requires that both components of a power relationship are able to put forth their constitution of ‘the body’ in relation to their other’s. In the endless possibilities of what the body could be, of what the limits of bodily materialities could be, the body per se finally escapes the determination by power and serves as the foundational ground for resistance.

VII. Conclusion

What shape would resistance to power take if its point of origination were to be found in the body? How would a multiplicity of bodies situate themselves in an equal multiplicity of oppositional positionings? In what way can resistance to disciplinary, biological, and other forms of power invert their constitutive relationships, push back on the coherence of ‘the’ subject and ‘the’ body, and ultimately usher in new relations in which they are not so singularly determined? Perhaps it is, as Foucault suggests in Discipline and Punish, that the body, as in the case of the twentieth-century prison revolts, can issue a challenge to institutions in their “very materiality as an instrument and vector of power.”⁷⁰ Maybe, and more strongly, as Achille Mbembe suggests at the end of “Necropolitics,” the ultimate act of rupturing the distance between subject and object, interior and exterior, is the death inflicted both on and by the suicide bomber.⁷¹ Death, in this instance, marks the final transgression of the bodily ‘self.’

If there is indeed critical import in Foucault’s analyses—a question which I have intentionally put out of the current scope—perhaps it is that in demonstrating the foundational character of resistance, its possibility does not open up, but is rather shown to always have been open. There has been no instantiation of power where it has not met resistance, this much is empirically true. Were it not, there would be no rise and fall of societies, no ruptures in an eternal continuum, no unexpected confrontations which result in the fracturing of a grand nexus of social reality; no history. At the end of the day, there have only ever been ever-changing entities in their ever-changing environment. When relations of power begin to cement themselves, however, when they produce regimes of knowledge about themselves which relay distinct narratives from their underlying functioning, it may begin to appear as if this is not the case.

“Perhaps one day people will wonder”⁷² at the power relations of the past, Foucault has said, but indeed they always wonder about those which are still yet to come. If it were not already the case that resistance is possible, that it is contained within power as its necessary counter-component, would this still be? One necessarily understands, following Foucault, that ‘revolution’ is not possible in any modernist sense; there will be no great upheaval. Yet, if the reality of power’s effects upon the body is to be believed, there will continue to be bodies, multifaceted and differently articulated and distended across an entire socio-historical field. Death alone cannot put an end to the continuation of a body—the body persists beyond death, in its physical and social forms. The great multitude of relations propels a particular body, following its death, to take on a greater and greater signifying force. The upheavals will continue apace, the multiplicity of bodies growing only more so, and resistance will remain their primary mode of being. Foucault brings one to realize that this has always been the case.